Market
Insights
A look at the
current real estate market; provided by RE/MAX ALLIANCE
April/2015
Here’s
a question in keeping with the arrival of spring and the birth of a new
baseball season. What’s the most expensive baseball card ever sold? Is it the
Tulowitzki rookie card? Not! You’d have to go back over a hundred years for the
card that sold in 2007 at auction for $2.8 million to Ken Kendrick, owner of
the Arizona Diamondbacks. It’s the Honus Wagner T206 card produced by the
American Tobacco Company between 1909 and 1911.
With
that bit of baseball trivia, let’s segue from baseball to real estate and the
concept of scarcity. What made the Honus Wagner card so valuable was the fact
there were so few cards distributed – only forty to the public. What has made
home values increase over the course of the past few years across the Boulder
Valley and Front Range is too few homes available for sale. As an example of
appreciation, the average sales price of a single family home in the City of
Boulder in 2011 (when the real estate market bottomed out) was $664,620. The
average sales price of a single family home in the City of Boulder in 2014 was
$823,550. That’s a collective increase of 23.91% over that period of time.
That
same pattern of appreciation has transpired in the various municipalities
surrounding the City of Boulder. Once identified as bedroom communities, towns
and cities like Superior, Louisville, Lafayette, Erie, Broomfield, and the
mountain areas have grown-up over time. They haven’t reached the same level of
average sales value as the City of Boulder, but home values have continued to
increase throughout the Boulder Valley fostered by new construction and lack of
inventory.
Let’s see how
these previous bedroom communities did compared to the City of Boulder. Below
are single family average sales
prices for 2011 and 2014 for various geographic areas throughout the Boulder
Valley. Information is courtesy of IRES (the Northern Colorado MLS).
2011 2014
Area
Average Sales Price Average
Sales Price % Change
Boulder $664,620 $823,550 +23.91%
Superior $423,885 $509,950 +20.30% Louisville $412,121 $537,124 +30.33%
Lafayette $372,445 $433,416 +16.37%
Suburban
Plains $551,819 $618,848 +12.14% Suburban Mountains $398,398 $477,2 +19.79%
As
the City of Boulder gets built out (filled in), look for growth to the east.
Superior, Louisville and Lafayette are mostly in an in-fill status. Erie
continues to cultivate new home subdivisions and will eventually be larger in
terms of both number of residents and acreage than any of the three communities
just noted.
